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Robin gets make-up for the first time on her ninth birthday.
Her mother’s sitting on the couch watching her over a cup of coffee with those eyes marked darker by the war paints of women, the bright red lips staining her cup the way they have for years — it’s almost a surprise they haven’t left a pinkish halo marking like cave paintings and footprints kept whole in peat bogs for people to find millennia later — and skin masked in creams and soft powders. “Open it!” she says, placing the cup on the little side table, and her dad smiles with those grey crags of wrinkled ageing, encouraging.
She does. Peels back the pink wrapping paper, catching her sparkly painted nails in the packaging beneath. “What’s this?”
“Foundation.” Her mom leans forwards and grabs one of the other presents from the small pile. “And this one is mascara.”
She holds them in her palms, the coldness of them. “Cool. Thanks.”
*
She watches her mom one morning at her vanity, laying on her parents bed on her stomach, chin in her hands. Watches the way it smooths over her face. The way it blanks and then redefines. The way she holds her skin tight so it doesn’t wrinkle.
In the mirror on her parents’ closet, Robin does the same with her sweaty fingertips, flattens the line between her brows that’s already carved itself in her skin. She thinks she looks like her mom, their brown hair and light eyes and carefully evened skin.
*
Her mom has these magazine cut-outs pinned around the mirror on her vanity. Robin reads them one day out of curiosity and boredom. ‘No More Aging! Ten Tips!’, ‘Wrinkles Away, Top Products’, ‘Ageing Gracefully’. She peers into the mirror where her mother looks everyday and consciously relaxes her eyebrows and lets her mouth fall into its sad little resting line.
*
She stops using the straws at the diner when she goes with her friends and she darkens her eyelashes with mascara and tries not to laugh too loudly or too expressively, she doesn’t frown over her math homework or pick at her skin. She steals a little spot of her mom’s wrinkle cream some nights, just in case. Her mother smiles and does the same and it crawls into a little space in Robin’s chest where she wants to be womanly .
*
They’re at Robin’s aunt’s for her fiftieth and she’s standing in the kitchen with all the women as they talk, out in the living room she can hear the low rumble of the men and the sound of the TV. Robin’s place is here, though, even though she wants to talk to her boy cousins about comics like she used to.
“You look so grown up, honey,” says Aunty Emma, coming up close and peering into her eyes. “Such a lovely shade, Mels where’d you get that?”
Her mom comes over, drying her hands on a tea towel and says, “Oh, Robin bought that herself. These sparkly eyeshadows, I’ll never get the hang of what looks good, she’s got a real eye though hasn’t she?” She sounds proud and it feels good and sunny in Robin’s heated cheeks.
She ducks her head. “Thank you, Aunty Emma.”
“You look just like your mom, don’t you? Wow.”
“Don’t tell the poor girl that,” says her mom with a laugh, “she doesn’t want to look like this old bat.”
“Mels…”
Robin stops listening to the conversation, cuts the carrots she’d been put in charge of into equal chunks with quiet precision. Her mom calls her beautiful all the time, all the time. Wakes her with a Good morning, beautiful girl but now she says they’re nothing alike. Robin sees it, sees the similarities and familiarities between them, solid and real on her face. On their faces. Inherited and carefully regulated. So either her mom lies when she calls Robin beautiful, or when Robin ages she will be “ugly” too.
She stops frowning at the carrots and relaxes her face in increments. No wrinkles. No emotion. No ugliness.
*
Robin gets into magazines and the tips and the fashion and the ads and the women — gorgeous women, unlined and young or ageing gracefully , with their smooth skin and easy smiles and flawless make-up. The women with their curves and straight lines and unerring, unnerving perfection. She probably likes them more than she’s meant to.
*
When she meets Steve, she meets someone who won’t be saved by wrinkle cream. He’s scarred and battered and he’s already got semi-permanent worry lines around his eyebrows. Not that that’s really a concern for men, especially men like Steve with his battle-hardy looks and enthusiastic emotion.
He doesn’t seem to care about the state of her wrinkles because he likes to make her laugh, mucking about with his scooper and pulling faces through the window when it’s his turn to come out front. Every time he manages to make her laugh — loud and expressive and wrinkly — he gets this big stupid grin and Robin’s scared, sometimes, that he makes her laugh because he likes her.
He seems to like to make her worry too, especially when they’re locked down beneath the mall in some kind of fever dream Red scare. (It’s kind of ridiculous how those shining tools the ‘doctor’ had, glimmering bright and cruel in the authoritarian lighting, had made her think of scarring and marring her perfect smoothness. How when she screamed for Steve — heard him, his desperate yelling — she thought of the over-expression, the lines she could be carving, the emotion leaving her breathless and worried for her complexion, even there , below the mall.) When he’s getting himself tortured and beaten up and still trying to make her laugh.
*
“What’s that?” Steve’s watching her from his bed, because this is something she does now apparently: sleep in Steve Harrington’s house, in his arms, and try to hide from the nightmares in the smell and feel of him.
“Wrinkle cream.” She has her own now, her mom caught her taking some once and bought it for her at Christmas last year. She’s started packing an overnight bag with all her make-up stuff whenever she goes over to Steve’s because she knows she’ll end up staying over. Her mom thinks she has a boyfriend, she and Steve don’t do much to dissuade her of that.
“Why?”
“To stop me from getting wrinkles? Why else?”
She can almost feel him frowning and almost asks him if he wants some too before he says, “But… why? Why wouldn’t you want wrinkles?”
“To age gracefully.” She shrugs. “It’s stupid really.”
She can hear him thinking long after she’s bundled up in his bed, trying to sleep.
*
She takes the straw out of her milkshake and sips carefully. “So Vickie is now, basically, going to be the death of me.”
He’s glaring at her straw like it’s personally offended him, for some reason. “Because she sits near you in band?”
“Yeah. Well. She just needs to stop existing in my vicinity, period.” She stuffs some fries in her mouth. “But, like, there’s not much I can do about it.”
“No,” he murmurs, still staring at her straw, “not really.”
“What?”
“Hmm?”
“You’re staring at my straw.”
“I was just — It doesn’t matter.” He frowns. “It’s stupid, really.”
*
One morning when she’s half-awake and warm in the honeyed sunlight of Steve’s room, she feels his big warm fingers on her face, they’re dry and almost burning, like a desert. She feels them on her cheeks, gliding between her brows, pressing to the corners of her mouth. It’s like he’s looking for something, she doesn’t know if he finds it.
“Good morning,” he says and she wonders how he even knows she’s awake, that he knows her that well.
She mumbles back, not really all that coherent and feels him laugh in the pillow, the rumble of it.
“You want breakfast?”
“Yeah. Please.” She smiles as he kisses her head when he gets up, watches his warm shadow leave the room, his hair tousled and not styled. She loves him so much, sometimes, that she thinks it might leave marks. He’s like a brother, or something more. He’s like a fragment of herself she’s been missing for so long she never even knew she’d lost it.
And she stretches in his bed, yawning. And she allows herself the wrinkles of a grin, just for a moment.
*
“You look so pretty.” Her mom claps her hands to her chest. “Oh, my darling beautiful girl.”
“Don’t cry, mom.”
Her dad laughs. “You’re not going to be able to get her to stop, she was crying all last night.”
Her mom slaps his chest. “ Pete it’s not funny . Look at her. Prom, wow. And with a date.”
Steve grins at her from across the room and mouths, Date .
She rolls her eyes and flattens the front of her dress. “Pictures then, mom?”
“Oh, yes!” She hurries about getting the camera and checking the film.
Robin goes to stand by Steve in his blue suit and hair. Steve Harrington, her prom date, somehow, and her best friend, even more improbably. He grins at her. “You do look good,” he tells her.
“Thanks. I feel like an idiot.”
He laughs. “You look like a good idiot, though. Lets see your camera smile.”
She grimaces at him.
“Wow, that’s gorgeous.”
“Shut up.”
“Just pretend I said something funny, that always makes you smile.” He’s still grinning all charming and cocky and Steve. She loves him so much.
“I’m supposed to look happy.”
“Oh, ha ha.” He pokes her. “Just smile big, you’ll want to remember it.”
She wonders what he means because he sounds like he’s saying something bigger than he is, but then her mom points the camera at them and starts directing their positions. She thinks she almost grasps it, though, he wants her to smile big enough that it might leave a wrinkle.
*
After that she sort of realises that’s been his plan all along.
Every laugh and exasperated frown and smile and every night she’s forgotten to put her wrinkle cream on. All of that: Steve’s doing. He wants her to remember .
*
She knows what he’s looking for now when she wakes to his fingers on her face.
*
They get older, as most people do, and the world actually gets less terrifying. The monster problem gets dealt with and sometimes Robin has to stop and wonder if they’d hallucinated the whole thing, something in the Hawkins water or whatever. Then she’ll look at Steve’s face — the scars on the bridge of his nose and his cheek and around his lips — and she’ll know it was all real, all of it, she’ll remember.
When she looks at Steve’s face, though, she can also see all the other stuff. The worry lines the kids have put there, the laugh lines around his mouth, the smile wrinkles and crows feet about his steady eyes.
If she takes a look in the mirror she sees her mother’s face — her “ugly” old face — with the lines that Steve put there, constructed with careful, scarred hands. She loves it. She loves her face and the memories etched there. It’s so human, she thinks. Human that Steve cared enough, loved enough, to put them there. Human that time has left its mark, radiantly imperfect and gracelessly graceful. So human to laugh and smile everyday and so human of it to stay there on her face for the whole world to see.
Sometimes she wakes up (in their bed, because Steve wanted her safe and married and he’d made sure she was laughing in every photo of her wedding) and his fingertips are still warm and light on her skin. She knows what he’s looking for now, she knows he finds it. Every time he knows she’s awake and she still doesn’t know how and he still makes her breakfast in bed, but now she takes his hand before he can move away and she kisses the fingertips that haven’t smoothed away her wrinkles but painted them, and she kisses the scarred knuckles. She loves him, sometimes too much, in a way that she can never articulate. He’s always going to be hers — more permanent even than wrinkles.
“Good morning,” he murmurs, thumb pausing by her left eye.
She smiles and feels the wrinkles there move with the memory of a thousand smiles before it. “Morning.” She takes his hand and kisses his thumb and his knuckles lightly.
“You want breakfast?”
The memory of the first time he did this overlays them here, the same smiles, the same voices, the same moment. “Yeah. Please.”
She grins hard at the ceiling as he leaves and hopes it leaves a mark — a beautiful, graceless mark.